Mentoring in Christian Higher Education: Cross-Cultural Reflections From Australia

Abstract

This article undertakes to respond to the work of the three preceding authors and to compare and contrast their observations with the Christian cross-cultural setting in Australia. Authors of the previous articles address holistic mentoring at three levels—institutional, organizational, and individual—and offer recommendations for institutional leadership, formal mentoring programs, and pedagogies. In responding to their contributions, we reflect on adaptations and affordances for integrating mentoring and formation in Christian higher education for people from diverse cultural and faith backgrounds. This article also examines the different psychological, spiritual, professional, and other hues that mentoring takes on for different people and stages of career development and individual formation. Thus, we think about mentoring that occurs not only between faculty or between faculty and students but also between experienced and early-career researchers. Whereas mentoring mostly occurs one-on-one, we also consider occasional settings such as a research writing retreat in which multiple peers can inform and inspire one another or in which professors lead early-career researchers in first-time grant applications and co-created publications. Although the multiculturalism and multi-faith and interdisciplinary encounters we discuss may be more prominent in Australia than elsewhere, we believe the knowledge we gained from expanding our cultural horizons and intercultural competencies may be useful to others. This knowledge is likely to be of value as educators in different countries meet situations of interfaith, intercultural, and interdisciplinary dialogue, student cohorts marked by increasing diversity, and many competing voices as secularism is globally on the rise.